Week 6 of 54 — Monkey mind

Week 6 of 54 — Monkey mind

I woke up at 3:42, I was in some Asian country at that time.

There was nothing outside. Just the sound of a distant car. The refrigerator. My head already talking.

I opened my phone before I even put my feet on the ground.

Nothing. No important messages.

It wasn't to check. It was to avoid being.

A mind that jumps from branch to branch and screams while jumping.

Buddhists call it kapicitta. Monkey mind.

I call it, for as long as I can remember, restlessness.

It never stops.

You know what I mean?

I personally have tried to silence it in every way over the years.

Alcohol. Substances. Nights that never ended. People I never saw again. Work until four in the morning. Cities. Flights. Buying things. Stopping buying things. Diets. The gym. Wrong loves. Sports. New business ideas every two weeks.

It worked for an hour. Sometimes two.

Then it came back stronger. The noise became a constant, the attempts to make it stop infinite, and the mistakes started to weigh heavy.

Because it's one thing to make wrong choices at 15, another at 20, and a completely different story at 25.

There are decisions and mistakes that can weigh on you for years.

But in life there's always a way, always.

And like everything else, the key result exists only in knowing how to change your point of view.

The truth is that personally I wasn't trying to turn it off. I was trying to fill it. And what you fill must overflow, sooner or later.

One evening I started asking myself, while writing, what exactly this noise was made of.

And then the real questions. The ones that hurt.

Why am I living this life?

Why am I getting these results right now and not others?

Why am I not having what I really want?

These were the questions that monkey mind doesn't want you to ask yourself.

Because monkey mind plays only one game. Chaos. The more noise it produces, the less time you have to ask yourself why. It's its perfect trick. It keeps you busy suffocating it, so you never go to see where it comes from.

And where does it come from? Doctrines. Academic teachings devoid of life experiences. Books studied without living them. Family patterns we might not have chosen. Voices of others we mistook for our own.

This is monkey mind's real game. Keeping you agitated on the surface, so you never go down to see who's underneath.

Listening to it doesn't mean indulging it. It means dismantling it, piece by piece. Understanding that every recurring thought comes from somewhere. A person you met. A wound you didn't know you had. An idea they handed you while you weren't looking.

A family member who convinced you by repeating the same thing over and over, and you ended up believing it.

Only by understanding the origin do you stop believing that the noise is you.

And from there, finally, you can start fighting it.

And not everyone is born already knowing who they are. I'm still discovering it.

I often spend time with those who are super defined in their self, who know exactly how they'll be next week, what they'll have in five years and what life will be like in fifteen.

I'm still trying to figure out whether to stay in this hotel tomorrow, or try a new bed, maybe further south on this island.

But I'm not running away. I'm searching.

But then comes a day when you stop looking at others, stop searching externally, and you become the center.

When you understand that you are important already today. With all your paranoias, with all your voices, with the noise inside your head.

The beauty of things is the truth that surrounds them.

And you, like me, are already someone now.

In the end, escaping monkey mind — even though it still screams sometimes, I admit — is a battle to fight every day.

What I was running from was exactly what I needed to embrace to understand it.

Myself.

Dealing with your own thoughts. With your own problems. And never giving up.

This has been my point of view.

We are masters of only one thing: our thoughts.

We can't control anything else.

We can't control whether our heart stopped beating right now, or if the roof of the hotel I'm in fell on me. We can't control politics, geography, the next war of a leader full of his own ego.

We can't control anything, except the way we think.

This is our mission on this planet. Fight monkey mind, one page at a time.

We must start controlling our thoughts. And start understanding that there's a much deeper, stronger self that wants to emerge.

Whatever happens, you can choose how to read it. You can choose what to focus on about that event, and how to react.

Controlling your thoughts equals controlling your emotions.

And don't you want to really start being happy every day, and have that happiness lead you to live the life you want to live?

In most cases it's exactly the one you're already living. All you have to do is start asking yourself those questions, and create a new point of view.

I open one of my old notebooks, I do it often. Five pages, from different years, say this.

August 3, 2021 — "Why is there this sense of restlessness inside me? Why do I keep looking for something I don't even know?"

October 13, 2021 — "Travel. More than travel I'd say escapes. What I don't understand is just what I'm running from."

October 24, 2021 — "My greatest strength is independence, but it implies my greatest weakness: being alone."

June 15, 2024 — "I live restless with the desire to do everything and the ability to do more."

August 10, 2024 — "I'm finding myself, I'm centering myself. I'm becoming the man I want to be."

Three years. Five pages. The question at the beginning was one. The answer at the end came on its own.

Between the third point and the fourth, two and a half years passed. Years where I kept writing without seeing anything. Then it happened, suddenly. That's how it works.

Not because I thought about it more. Because I wrote about it more. I looked at it more. I recognized it more.

Examining every single piece of me under a microscope gave me a moment of silence in my mind.

And that silence opened me to a new world.

And the results I tried to seek for ten years all came together.

I don't know how to stop hearing those screams.

But I know it's possible.

It starts by asking yourself: why.

And then a strange thing happens.

Once you've started asking why, life starts answering you.

With small things.

It makes you meet that person, in a bar you shouldn't have entered. It makes you find that book, on a shelf you weren't looking at.

It makes you hear a sentence, in the middle of a conversation that had nothing to do with it, but actually had everything to do with it.

One crumb at a time, it takes you to a different axis of your life.

You don't notice it right away. You notice it after a month. After three. After a year.

One morning you wake up, have your coffee, and realize you're thinking in a way that four years ago you wouldn't have even known how to name.

And there you understand something that's almost scary, it's so beautiful.

You're changing.

You're taking yourself, with force and gentleness together, to a new level. Exactly what monkey mind, for years, kept you from seeing.

You're no longer running from who you are.

You're becoming someone else. Who you chose. Not who they made you believe you are.

More yourself than before.

Fifty-four attempts to become better. This is the sixth. Best, Stefano.

Up next: the art of defining your boundaries.

Fifty-four attempts to become better.
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